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If you filled out the Blockchain Common App you should start hearing back in the next few days—the applications are going out to all the projects this evening.

Nine OPENDIME hardware wallet giveaway winners were chosen randomly from our subscribers; the tenth was awarded to the person who could come up with the shortest snippet of code to generate 10 pseudorandom numbers between 1 and 6013 for the giveaway. Props to Bitcoin core contributor Jeremy Rubin & cryptographer Jordi Herrera both of whom arrived at winning solutions.

Many of you emailed to say the MIT Bitcoin Expo tickets were already sold out—apparently that was due to a bug which they’ve fixed, and there are actually about 100 tickets left. They’ve asked us to give away 2 additional free tickets to apologize for the previous mixup—if you’d like one of those, please ping me on Twitter: first come, first served.

The Decentraland folks have offered up 3 parcels of LAND in Genesis City to PoW readers—shoot me a proposal for what you’d like to build by Twitter DM (please mention any prior experience creating 3d content for priority!) and I’ll send 1 LAND parcel each to the first three good proposals. Bonus points to anyone who wants to implement the Kowloon Walled City on their LAND :)

Happy to add Cosmos/Tendermint updates to the letter, which will be coming from Zaki Manian, who is one of the smartest people in the space and worth a follow on his own as well.

Ari from Decentraland

We are debugging our LAND marketplace, which will be launched next week.

We’ve also just published a post discussing our involvement in the community driven improvements for the ERC721 standard [ed: interesting, since I think Decentraland is likely to be one of the primary places people use collectible NFTs]

Zaki from Cosmos/Tendermint

Very positive early results from security audits. Only low risk issues so far.

Launch of a public dev chat for Cosmos SDK. The Cosmos SDK is like Ruby on Rails for Cosmos Zones. The relationship between the Hub and the SDK is analogous to Ruby on Rails to Basecamp for 37 Signals. The Hub is the first product built with the SDK.

The 15th is the final day for submissions for the Stellar Build Challenge

Doug from Livepeer

Released Livepeer node 0.1.13 which no longer has a dependency on ffmpeg. Just download the binary, run "livepeer --rinkeby" and you're ready to broadcast live on the Rinkeby testnet.

Completed external smart contract security audit with Trail of Bits, and the path is clear for main net deployment in short order. The report and responses will be published this week.

Helena & Jutta from Polkadot

Parity Bridge, a short-term scaling solution, was released last week to allow devs to start testing their high-performance Dapps. A crucial part of Polkadot, the bridge allows actors on a high-fee blockchain to call functions on a low-cost Proof-of-Authority chain. Bjorn Wagner presented how Parity Bridge works at EthCC in Paris, and if you missed it, you can watch it here.

We're hiring in Berlin and looking for developers to build the future of blockchain and Web 3

Paige & Zooko from Zcash

We’re working on a pre-testnet Overwinter activation test network. The idea here is to have a better idea of the tests we’ll need and any tweaks or updates necessary to properly evaluate the actual testnet activation which targets March 19th (testnet block height 207500). If all goes smoothly with the Overwinter activation on testnet, 1.1.0 will include the main net activation height which targets June 25th and as a result, will be the first release that is Overwinter compatible.

If keeping track of these releases and projected dates is confusing, have no fear—we’re setting up an internal visual roadmap for upcoming releases and network upgrades this week!

Specification for the Sapling upgrade is undergoing final pre design-audit touchups, and planning for integration has begun as well. Roadmap has Sapling implemented and a testnet activation height in 1.1.1; if all goes well with testing, the 2.0.0 release will contain a main network activation block height.

Shipped update v0.16 to blockstack.js which adds support for generation of Blockstack name transactions in JavaScript.

Began an in-depth review and redesign of our on-boarding process to optimize it for mobile devices.

JZ from Decred

The code for dcrdata.org, our Decred block explorer written from scratch in Golang, now lives on github here and has received a significant amount of polishing recently. Users will notice how snappy it is compared to our fork of Insight. Reimplementing insight-api is one of the tasks that remains to be completed.

Work has been started on refactoring dcrd in order to properly support efficient multi-peer parallel downloads.

We’ve released a PHP API for Decred, which will serve as the basis for a myriad of payment plugins that do not require users to rely on third party services in order to accept payment in DCR on their e-commerce sites.

Merged two big changes to the protocol: exchange abstraction (allows any decentralized exchange to be used with dYdX) and owner generalization (allows smart contracts to easily own and manage positions)

Setting up for multiple engineering work trials in the next 2 weeks

Looking for bigger office space in SF to support our growing team

Brian from OpenBazaar

We're releasing 2.1.1 any hour now and it's going to include OB1 Verified Moderators which is a program we're running to vet trusted moderators so that merchants have some good options that they can trust and buyers can trust merchants have a good one chosen.

There are also a bunch of bug fixes in the 2.1.1. release as well

James from Vertcoin

February developer update released: work continues on new wallets, more exchanges, the new website etc.

This week we saw a sustained uptick in volume on 0x relayers, averaging $650k of notional value exchanged per day. This uptick appears to be the result of one of the first market makers going online.

We continue to make progress on 0x protocol v2 and are excited to share some of the new capabilities in future blog posts.

We will soon release a sneak peak of a new product we are building that allows for "1-click token purchases" that provides the best market rate and abstracts away WETH and ZRX from the end user [ed: this is ultra exciting to me. One of the biggest promises of 0x is a clean way for various services to easily interface with a pool of token liquidity, that doesn’t require them to trust a specific exchange’s API]

Simar from Stream

I’ll be speaking at TokenFest this Friday at 3:45pm on regulatory considerations in token design.

We’re closing out our private presale this Friday and can get back to building out Stream full time

Our token whitepaper will be released tomorrow!

Diego and Riccardo for Monero

Hard fork date has been set. The fork block height is 1539500. This roughly correlates to March 28th! [ed note: this hard fork will likely make any covert ASICs mining on the Monero network into bricks. Will be interesting to observe the hashrate change, if any, to infer how many ASICs were lurking out there]

This week brought a lot of developer updates to Sia. These are necessary features to make development and testing easier and faster, but may not be noticed by the average user. For example, several new commands were added to the Makefile (#2827, #2829), automated testing was updated (#2825, #2823), builds now report the Git revision hash and build timestamp (#2833), new API endpoints for the client package were added (#2843), improved reporting (#2826, #2818), and a variety of minor bug fixes (#2820, #2844, #2831), and spelling mistakes (#2821, #2819) were resolved.

Sia 1.3.2-RC3 was released late Friday with all the improvements above merged in. This is likely the final release candidate before a public release is available in the coming days.

The Sia team has been interviewing various candidates for our open positions and hope to have them filled in the next couple of weeks. Nebulous will also be moving offices later this month!